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NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition Review

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Founders Edition: Conclusion

What we see with the GTX 1070 Founders Edition is that NVIDIA's tried and true method of scaling the architecture up and down to meet performance targets is once again working quite nicely. The introduction of NVIDIA's Pascal architecture built on a 16nm FinFET process has added the FPS performance needed to allow end users to take that big leap up the hardware ladder to the next level of performance. At NVIDIA's Pascal launch event, a slide that caught everyone was that the GTX 1070 was going to be as fast as the top card in the Maxwell product stack, the GTX Titan X. Truth be told, that target was reached and exceeded in many cases in my testing. From 1920 x 1080 through 3840 x 2160, the GTX 1070 was every bit the equal of the GTX Titan X, and in many cases it was the faster card.

When you look at target pricing and see that the GTX 1070 Founders Edition is a cool $550 less than the GTX Titan X, the reason to snap up a GTX 1070 is pretty clear. If you are currently rocking a GTX 970, the performance gap between the Maxwell-based GTX 970 and the Pascal-based GTX 1070 Founders Edition is absolutely huge in every test. The scaling is not quite 80%, but when you see 50% or better bumps in performance it makes the case clearer as an upgrade path.

As a Founders Edition card, this GTX 1070 sports all of the major in-house design work on the PCB, voltage circuits, and data pathways to eek out every bit of FPS performance. This new Founders Edition design is well equipped to manage the thermals with a heat pipe and aluminum fin array-based cooling solution to keep the clock speeds as high as possible to drive FPS performance. NVIDIA spent the time and research dollars to make sure we as consumers get the best possible design so that the Founders Edition can be sold throughout the entire product cycle rather than just the initial launch, while the board partners are ramping up their designs. While I discussed the premium nature of the Founders Edition cards in my GTX 1080 review, the thought is still odd when you have what are essentially the reference designs being sold at a premium over the AIB partner cards. Cards that come with improved cooling solutions and at times better components and build specs. It will be interesting to see what the sales results are long term.

Overclocking is going to drive performance up even higher. Much like the GTX 1080 where we saw great scaling of the core and memory clock speeds, the GTX 1070 is no slouch in that department. The final core clock speeds reached, thanks to NVIDIA's Turbo Boost 3.0 technology, mirror those I saw on the GTX 1080, while the GDDR5 memory is pretty much the highest clocking stuff I have tested so far! Check ou the my article where I dive into overclocking the GTX 1070. Needless to say, it's got some impressive headroom.

Throwing all the latest tech from NVIDIA such as VRWorks, Simultaneous Multi-Projection, Ansel, DirectX 12 with support for Vulkan, and so much more, you the consumer get not only a great piece of hardware, but a whole ecosystem built to support it. Any way you look at it, the GTX 1070 Founders Edition is going to deliver a significant up tick in gaming performance that takes advantage of the latest tech that NVIDIA has to offer.

At $449 for the Founders Edition and pricing starting south of that for AIB cards, the GTX 1070 offers a great price performance point for the end user looking to upgrade at this time.